Introduction
Tsubasa Shiina is a 10-year-old girl who recently moved to Hokkaido to live with her father. In school, she is very quiet and unsociable with her classmates. Then one night, she witnesses a UFO crash in the forest near her home. She rushes to the scene and finds the pilot, codenamed "D.D.", in a barely stable condition. Also in the scene is a Maguar, a hideous alien that hatched aboard D.D.'s ship. As the Maguar is close to taking Tsubasa's life, an alien lifeform fuses with her body to form the Riberus battle armor Figure 17, which shortly destroys the alien threat. The life form takes the name Hikaru and turns into an identical twin of Tsubasa. As time passes, Tsubasa becomes more open to everyone around her, thanks to her new twin sister Hikaru. However, with Maguar eggs scattered all over Hokkaido, their ability to form Figure 17 is needed to eliminate all hatched Maguars until backup from D.D.'s home planet arrives on Earth.
(Source: ANN)
Audience reviews
11 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
zettai-jin-stray
The overall story is as thin as a shoestring, and long like one too, with its belabored duration. Without checking who did series composition, it has the feel of being written by someone not accustomed to SF. When I look at the studio, director, and art director I can’t say SF is at all typical for them. But a lot of this anime is cozy Hokkaido farm town and school activities, greatly realized with Shichiro Kobayashi’s background paintings. While the SF side of the anime is lacking, other than the monster designs maybe, with not terribly interesting fights or characters (Daisuke and Oldina), there is a good pathos created from Tsubasa and Hikaru. It’s cozy not in a dissimilar way to ToHeart, the character designs sure look nice. The worst thing about this anime though is that it has probab…
Read at the sourceCosmicFusion
Figure 17 is a hidden gem from the early 2000s that never got the recognition it deserved.
The story centers around a child Tsubasa Shiina who comes across a crashed alien spacecraft piloted by an injured spaceling named D.D. who was carrying creatures called Maguars. Tsubasa teams up with him along with her newly created clone "sister" of herself, Hikaru, to battle the remaining Maguars that have appeared on Earth. With that, Tsubasa now harnesses the power of titular 'Figure 17' with Hikaru. Just after that incident, Tsubasa now leads a double life, appearing as a regular grade schooler in public while secretly battling the Maguars behind the scenes. While Figure 17 comes across as mostly straightforward with its easy-to-follow story, it also handles timeless themes like coming-of-age,…
Read at the sourceCaptainKenshiro
Figure 17 is the cute story about a little girl who gets parasitized by an alien who takes her form, stays on her house, eats part of her food, pretends to be her twin, is part of the brainwash of her father to make him think he always had two daughters, becomes better than her at everything at school while becoming more popular there, and makes her fight against horrible dangerous monsters.
There’s this little precious Tsubasa Shiina, a shy and rather quiet girl with clear problems to socialize and lack of self-esteem partly because of the loss of her mother, her dad being away almost all day at work and almost absent for her, and because she recently moved on to a new place and school. She bumps into a crashed spaceship where some eggs of extraterrestrial monsters hatch and scatter over…
Read at the sourceProxyLain
Anime with 13 episodes of 50 minutes each can seem "scary" and it also takes a lot of people away from a work. In the case of Figure 17, it works very well.
We follow the story of Tsubasa and Hikaru, two little girls who end up becoming twin sisters.
As much as it has action and a lot of science fiction, this is far from being the focus of the anime. The focus is everyday life and the relationship between the characters.
But what makes this anime so special? Simple: Realism. An anime where it treats everything in a very realistic way, even more so when it comes to the interaction of the characters. But not only that, he also talks about dependency. Tsubasa is very shy and depends on Hikaru for a lot (which reminds me of Doraemon, watch Stand By Me Doraemon, here's my recommendation), or m…
Read at the sourceRaynor84
Saw the whole thing on Tubi TV, I saw the deeper episodes last night and today, the heartfelt parts of the whole series, mostly the ones involving Tsubasa, Hikaru and Sho were the ones that were tear-jerkers for me personally and near the end I cried the hardest when Hikaru disappeared as the Figure 17 suit separated from Tsubasa for the last time, and since I personally lost my father on January 8th, 2018... this struck me pretty hard as the most heart-warming while tear-jerking Anime title I've ever seen!
Sadly, there are too many emotional triggers for me in this Anime, so I will not be buying this Anime as a box-set at all, it's just too emotionally painful for me, besides, my dog tragically died in the summer of 2017 while I was still in Las Vegas before I moved back to Georgia in No…
Read at the sourcektulu007
Figure 17 is a thirteen episode anime from the early 2000s. OLM, the same studio behind Gunsmith Cats, Disgaea & Pokemon, was responsible for bringing it to life. It was written by Yonemura Shouji, who also worked on scripting episodes for both Doki Doki Precure & Hunter x Hunter. So, that's all a positive sign as far as I'm concerned. Let's get into it.
Story:
Shiina Tsubasa is having a rough time. She's lost her mother and just moved to a new area for her father's work. To top it all of, she's very shy and doesn't make friends easily. At least the place she moves has a nice dog that she gets to look after. I immediately relate to this character. Change the parent she lost and that's my childhood. One night things change when there's a loud crash. Tsubasa wakes up and finds a UFO with a…
Read at the sourceSilverSlayer
If you're looking for a unique anime, this is the one!
The thing that is most interesting about this anime is that while it does have some pretty neat sci-fi aspects to it, that's not the point of the anime. In fact, the sci-fi/fight scenes in the anime are overlooked by the incredible character development. Most animes either have a stagnant character, or they grow fairly quickly. The amazing thing about Figure 17 is the fact the character growth is actually fairly slow, which makes it feel incredibly realistic.
Another thing about the anime is how invested you become with the characters. Some might say that the 42-minute episode length is unnecessary, but given the fact that there are only 13 episodes I think having longer episodes is very important to the investment of the character…
Read at the sourceyumenichan
The first thing that captures your attention is the art. The cute characters and the flowing lines attract you to it.
The background music is also very enjoyable and entered at the appropiate time.
The story is quite good actually. I won't tell anything of course, but it is definitly worth to see :).
The only down thing for me was the length of an episode. At almost 45 minutes long I think the storie is a bit stretched out and could have been even more enjoyable if it had been shortened.
Read at the sourceKholdStare88
What is Figure 17? That's exactly my question when I first heard about it. I asked everyone I knew, and found only one other person who knew about it. No one seems to know about this obscure yet I first found it while browsing through Saimoe 2002. The first thing that interested me about Figure 17 was how cute the characters in the show are. However, as I watch on, not expecting anything great, Figure 17 somehow evolved into one of my favorite anime of all time.
I see Figure 17 was having two separate stories. One part of Figure 17, the "main plot," was the story of Tsubasa Shiina's encounter with the aliens at a UFO landing site and her attempts to help destroy the Maguars (alien creatures). The other part is Tsubasa's friendship with Hikaru and their daily lives, either studying/playing…
Read at the sourcenixops
I had no preconceived notions about this anime when I bought it, but it had me rooted to the spot in the first episode. Not so much for the action sequences, but for the dynamics of the relationship between the 2 girls that become the main characters and watching their friendship develop and Tsubasa slowly finding herself with the prompting of Hikaru.
I enjoyed seeing their interaction with their friends and dailly lives, and how they dealt with the ever sinister threat presented by the Magyars, and how each time Tsubasa finds the courage to stand up and fight when called upon by her "sister". Sadly, the last few episodes were weepies, but in my case it was tears of joy at seeing our heroine blossom, with cherished memories and the hope of a new life back home in Tokyo.
The background artw…
Read at the sourceMeloria
Characters/Development
There are two aspects within the series. The first is where the characters fight off the Magyua threat one by one. Each fight is different from the last as we see the technology and weaponary being improved and new tatics thought up as each of the Magyua is different and stronger than the last in their own ways, which remains interesting throughout. The second is where Tsubasa struggles to become more self confident, especially during the fights with Magyua. There’s also the life of Tsubasa and Hikaru on the farm and during school as they both support each other and play with their friends during free time. There is both happy and sad moments which can bring a tear to your eye as the emotion feels realistic. Both aspects flow very well together as both are deve…
Read at the source